PCB’09 Diary:

7PM 1/23: PodCampers convene to decide the fate of tomorrow’s unconference. Much beer is consumed, (thanks to Slice of Lime,) though the only bottle openers present are a fork and Griffin’s wallet. Topics discussed include podcasting, wordpress plugins and hacks, Twittiquette, and animated .GIF’s. I sign up to talk about API’s and the Semantic Web.

2:30AM 1/24: I go to bed, and wish I hadn’t spent so much potential sleep time on tweaking my presentation for tomorrow.

9AM: Sleepy PodCampers devour Einstein bagels + coffee.

10AM: Neil Simon gives a great presentation on creating a WordPress plugin, something I was learning anyway for this blog. Includes handouts of all code, commented and annotated. I love my geeks.

11AM: Jeremy Tanner and friends talk about WordPress hacks. I never realized how many awesome WP plugins exist.

12PM: Discussion about Amazon’s EC2 elastic cloud services, led by Ronald Lewis. I’ve always wanted to give this a shot, but I always figured I had to pay an initial fee and be a l33t sysadmin to get started. In fact, Amazon charges only by bandwidth/storage, and has tons of pre-configured server images. I can launch a server instance from my iPod, and therefore feel like a badass. Thanks Ronald!

1PM: Eric, Griffin and I retire to Illegal Pete’s for some burrito action. We return to an open keg of K-9 Winter Ale, courtesy of Flying Dog, just in time for me to drink some courage before my 2PM preso!

3PM: After lots of meandering, I end up in a talk about advertising and new media, especially as they relate to podcasts. We decide that, while targeted advertisements via semantic contextual analysis (ie. GMail, Dapper et al) are cool, there is another variable involved: reputation. I am much more likely to buy or be interested in a product if it is directly mentioned by someone whose opinion I trust than if it just appears in their ad area, even it’s directly related to what I’m reading about.

4PM: The moment everyone has been waiting for arrives: PodCampers morph temporarily into zombies in order to learn the Thriller dance, led by Naomi. Jeremy posts a video online, to the chagrin/amusement of all involved:

Unfortunately, I’m about dead center in the video from :50 on.

5PM: More beer is consumed. Cornbread hates being called Cornbread. I bid a sad adieu to my PodFriends, and they head to Goremet (scary movies + scary food) in Denver. A long, great day comes to an end, and I leave feeling inspired.

Thanks again to all organizers, sponsors and attendees! This was an awesome event, and proves that a conference does not require lots of $$$ and expensive speakers to foster truly brilliant conversation.